


Call the Doctor

by tristesses



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-08-05
Updated: 2008-08-05
Packaged: 2017-10-28 21:29:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/312359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tristesses/pseuds/tristesses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While attempting to create his own amusements during his time in Arkham, the former doctor Crane meets a man who actually has some semblance of a plan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Call the Doctor

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on 8/5/2008.

They tried to wean him off the antipsychotics a few months ago. It was as if they’d torn the veil from his eyes and shown him reality again. He could think, and formulate thoughts and sentences instead of the dismal word salad he’d been getting used to spewing. Of course, if his psychiatrists had any idea he was fully coherent and conscious once more, they would merely up his dose again, send him back into limbo with the rest of the crazies. He played it close, hiding his alertness from them, obeying their pathetic little rules and acting the part of the reformed villain, like they expected him to. Acting was a skill he had polished to a gleam during his years teaching naïve grad students the psychology of fear, never allowing them to see how closely acquainted with the monster he truly was.

He unleashed that monster on the inmates in the cells across from him, and was delighted to see how much his talents had progressed. They quivered and sobbed from his very words; he didn’t need chemicals to exacerbate the effect of his voice, and no chemicals dimmed his clarity. Their fear was positively delicious, causing his arms to prickle, an almost carnal thing, but a thousand times better than any sexual experience he’d ever had.

When the first madman chewed his arms open, though, leaving splatters and arcs of blood on the walls of his cell that sickened Crane as much as it excited him, his friend across the hall spilled, sobbing and cringing, a hallucinatory mess, and told the psychiatrists about all of Crane’s evil, nasty words and how they drove the dead man to suicide. They swooped down on him like vicious black crows and hooked him up to an intravenous drip, buckled to a chair, until he was suitably intoxicated and easy to manage.

Now they just give him pills, constant pills, and injections. The drugs make him slow, make the tiny world of his cell seem a thousand miles away. His tongue is too heavy in his mouth; reality seems accessible only through a pane of glass. Haloperidol, chlorpromazine, the old standard, lithium, not to mention sertraline, although precisely what he’s depressed about no one has told him yet. It’s worse than the onslaught of chemicals the first time; apparently he’s twice as crazy now. Occasionally he regrets prescribing these drugs to his patients – some of them are his fellow inmates now, and they growl at him when he’s being led to his daily therapy sessions – but then again, had he not dosed them with fear gas, they would never have been declared insane and never institutionalized. He would never have been able to study them. And he won’t regret those experiments.

Sometimes the administrators let him work, just little chores like sweeping the hall, his daily socialization exercises that prepare him for what they call the real world – except, of course, for the burly men standing guard over him, syringes full of lorazepam at hand and waiting. Why? Even in an acute mania – which he’s certain he’s never had – those so-called guards could easily overpower a poor Scarecrow like himself with mere force.

Ah, if only he had a brain, a functioning brain not dulled by the bitter pills they bully him into taking. They make crows flutter in the corners of his vision, and send brittle bits of panic flying through him – hallucinations, adverse effects, he knows this and can reason away from his fear most of the time. He takes solace in anger, simmering and irrational but so soothing in a place where the firing of neurons is clamped down upon and ceased. The exterior of Crane is quiet, well-behaved, medicated. Scarecrow lies beneath, waiting for an excuse to emerge. He would pray if he believed in God, but as it is, prayers are useless. He believes only in rationality.

So when the man in the cell next door starts sniffing around like a dog looking for a toy, Crane listens. His ramblings are disjointed, existentialist in nature, but convey a type of super-sanity that chills Crane as much as it comforts him. If there is any solace in this place, it lies with the clown; he’s the only man capable of pulling the asylum to pieces around him and surviving. Crane gives in and puts his faith with the madman, certain he will, eventually, tear the place to shreds, and release the crazies back into the streets. Crane does not have to wait long.  



End file.
